Post 5: War God

                 Important: For the first 7 posts on this Blog, it is best to read them in order!

War God

I’ll give one final example of how magical spells embed a mirror within them – money. Money is a potent magical spell that can summon all kinds of potentials into existence. For money is a mirror, or reflection, of the time and space necessary to provide any good or service. And we assume that it therefore is a reflection of wealth.

We often lay paper bills and plastic cards down as we would wave a magic wand. Abracadabra, give me a cheeseburger. Abracadabra, give me a spool of black poly pipe. Let me summon additional weight to the momentum of processes that led to this cheeseburger, to this spool of pipe. We are all continually summoning the world into existence through the magic of money. The power of voting is laughing stock in the face of how this mighty power shapes our world.

And when we truly see how we sorcerer’s apprentices have been using money, we will see that we have all fallen under a spell of our own making. There is no longer any separation of church and state here in America. Regardless of whatever our acknowledged beliefs may be, we have all fallen under the spell of worshipping the same god.

We all go to him daily. His altars and temples are everywhere. And to appease him, we continually lay down and sacrifice the world upon his altar.

This god is a war god. He is out to destroy the world. And his name is the cheapest price.

But where is the gratitude in always choosing the cheapest price? And yet we do it time and time again, summoning more and more weight to the momentum of processes which have taken on a life and mind of their own, that only serve themselves, and that never return the power back to the source.

Who can provide goods and services for the cheapest price? Sure, it sometimes is those who are the most innovative, the least wasteful, the hardest working and/or most intelligent. But let’s be honest. Very often it’s those who operate on the hugest economy of scale, who are able to externalize the most actual costs, and/or pay the lowest wages. We know this.

Some folks look upon the horror of hugely centralized, corrupt powers in this world, and complain that Obama is a communist, or that Bush is a fascist, but I instead say that we are a bunch of clueless honkies unaware of continually waving the magical spell of money around, and every day we summon into the world more and more centralized, corrupt powers.

Who can provide food for the cheapest price? Well, huge farms that are addicted to fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides and genetically engineered seeds, that’s who.

Who can provide electricity at under $0.12 per kilowatt hour? Well, huge centralized corrupt powers that blow the tops off of the Appalachian Mountains to scrape out the coal into rail cars, that’s who.

Who can provide a kiln-dried, planed 10 foot 2x6 consistently for under $0.75 per board-foot? Well, huge centralized, corrupt powers that clear-cut stands of old-growth trees in the Pacific Northwest, or that endlessly rotate cloned mono-cultures of clear-cut tree plantations on sprayed lands, that’s who.

There’s no need to go and blame the farmers, or the loggers, or the miners of this world, when it is all of us, through clueless consumption, who continually conjure into the world an economic treadmill where only the most exploitative and destructive can survive.

Cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap timber are the three strands of the rope used as the noose around our necks. 

And, yet, amazingly enough, this is nothing for us to feel guilty about. We all do it to some degree. More and more of us will feel pressed to do it more and more as the coming economic contractions roll in. We will simply have to be more coherent with our magic.

Sure, but what in the world does that mean? Good question. We’re slowly getting there. Thanks for your patience.

We thought we were using money as a mirror or reflection of wealth for all of this time, but alas, it turns out instead that we have been using money not as a reflection of wealth, but of debt. And so we have therefore been confusing debt for wealth for longer than anyone can remember.

What I mean is this – the only way that money comes into being in any country in the modern world is as a representation of debt. Money is created out of thin air, mostly as debt with interest – either as debt to a private central bank who just issued the money, or as simply a loan by a private bank, under the terms of fractional reserve banking.

Before getting too lost down the rabbit hole of fractional reserve banking and central banking practice, the pivotal point I am trying to address here is that every dollar (or other currency) is created as debt by a private bank – a debt payable with interest to that private bank. Now there are some obvious logical fallacies in this system - such as the fact that the creation of that new dollar now requires more money than is presently in circulation to be able to pay back both the principal and interest. So where does the money come from to be able to pay back that interest? Well, you guessed it. More money created as more debt, with more interest. That’s simply not a system with a bright future. 

That's definitely not "returning the power back to the source". But is instead returning the power back to a narcissistic ego. Talk about taking on a "mind of its own."

However, my point remains that this is not how it has to be. We don’t have to create money as debt with interest, payable to private banks. Money could simply be created as a mirror or reflection of wealth.

What would this look like? Well, it could look like more things than I myself can imagine, so I’m almost hesitant to say an example, for fear that this one example would get pigeonholed as the only possibility, and the whole notion dismissed out of hand.

I will suggest some actual examples in future posts, but for now let me focus on an even larger point, and say what surely appears to be a crazy suggestion at first: governments can print money out of thin air and spend it on the creation of sustainable infrastructure throughout society.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” – Most people say. You just can’t go and print money out of thin air! Money would become worthless if you just printed it out of thin air!

Well, the first challenging pill to swallow is that this is exactly how money is already created.

The second challenging pill to swallow, at least for Americans, is just how much money our country’s private central bank has recently been printing out of thin air. To put the amount in perspective – if you spent $1 million every day since Jesus was born, you would not have spent as much money as our central bank has printed out of thin air in the last 9 months. They call it “quantitative easing”. It’s a nice phrase. Look it up.

And what have they done with this money? They have primarily bought toxic mortgage-backed securities from the too-big-to-fail banks. This becomes even more fascinating when you realize that our central bank itself is basically a quasi-private cartel comprised primarily of the too-big-to-fail banks.

Not only does this remove losses from the big bank’s books for the bad bets they made during the housing bubble (bets on bets, actually, with all of their derivative hocus-pocus), it also creates an across-the-board inflation for the currency which increases prices on everything. But this inflation also works in the interest of the too-big-to-fail banks because it counters the deflation of the housing market’s bubble bursting, thereby also decreasing their losses for their bad bets in the housing market.

It is very easy to spin out of control emotionally around all of these issues and jump to all kinds of blame and conspiracy theories.

If I may, I want to reach beyond all of that, and simply make one simple statement and ask one simple question. The statement – this sad state of affairs is simply the unbelievable accumulation of miscast, ungrounded magical spells that have now unfortunately taken on a life of their own.  And have they ever.

The question – what if printing money out of thin air isn’t the problem? Could it be done in a grounded way, in a way that returns the power back to the source?

Instead of the money being printed by private banks, who require it all to be paid back with interest, and who spent it to erase all of their own bad bets; what if we instead printed it as governments, as groups of people, to create sustainable infrastructure throughout our society?

Not only would the money not have to be paid back with interest, it would not have to be paid back at all. What I mean is this – if the money was spent in a manner that increased the overall wealth of the country equal to the amount of money that was created – then there would be no inflationary repercussions. In other words, not only would there be more money in circulation, there would also be more wealth for which that money was a mirror or reflection, so therefore there would be no inflation.

What do we want: money as debt, or money as wealth?

Check out the next Clueless Honky Blog for more.

Thanks for your time and attention.